André Comte-Sponville's philosophy of love or The will to love better: an ethics for the 21st century
This master's thesis deals, in general, with love as a philosophical object and, more precisely, with the contemporary reflection on love developed by the French materialist philosopher André Comte-Sponville, for whom love would be the most important and vital among subjects philosophical. Comte-Sponville presents love as a plural feeling, essentially expressed through three concepts discussed throughout the history of Western philosophy: love as eros, love as philia and love as agape. Based on these three conceptions, Comte-Sponville develops his personal interpretation of love. Our intention with this dissertation is to expose and analyze the philosophy of love proposed by Comte-Sponville himself, and understand its articulation and its bond with his philosophy of morals. Love forComte-Sponville, in addition to a feeling, is also a value, a virtue, a normativity, in short, loving is the wisdom capable of definitively answering the substantial question of ethics: “How to live?”.